This week’s focus was on recovering a sense of autonomy.
This week was all about owning your title as an artist no matter how “successful” your art is or not.
An artist is a creator and a creator must create.
There was also a great section on MOVING your instrument aka your BODY to help ideas flow.
This was an important message for me to hear because I have been neglecting my body’s movement this fall in favor of creating instead, but if I can view movement as a daily tool and non-negotiable to HELP my creativity instead of something I must do in order to lose weight, then I would be much more motivated to go & move my body.
I am very proud of myself this week because I did a short reading of my one-woman play to an audience of 50+ people and got really great feedback. I was so scared that people would hate it, that it would be boring, bla bla, all of those blocks from FEAR that we tell ourselves.
Sharing it encouraged me so much because I had so many people say they absolutely loved it and they couldn’t wait to see the rest of it!
Proof that you can’t your fear overcome the need for sharing the work.
Artist Date
I had the most delightful artist date combining two things off my to-do list.
I made these essential oil rollers for my family for Christmas and I had so much fun creating the different scents.
Every scent was different and I got so into mixing the oils. Lavender lemon, peppermint orange, lavender bergamot, orange eucalyptus, are a few of the scents I created.
I love just being in the zone and creating like this. I was so focused on the task at hand I forgot everything else and was just truly in the moment.
(I also did this activity naked and when the oils would spill, would rub it on my body so I got some self-love oil massage in there too) I suggest you try the same 😉
Morning Pages
I skipped a few days of my pages this week…oops.
But, I did want to try something new with my pages. I feel like they’re more of a diary rather than a jumpstart to my creativity.
While it is helpful to brain dump and just talk about whatever is going on in my life, I find it wasn’t leaving me time to write poetry or songs, so this morning I did my pages dedicating them to random creative writings and I got like 2 poems and one song from it and felt much more creatively in tune and in flow! I think I will try that for the rest of this upcoming week.
Exercises of the Week
List 5 Ways you plan to nurture yourself in the next 6 months
- Take Susan Blackwell’s creativity workshop
- Spend a day or weekend at Kripalu
- Go on a personal writing retreat in London
- Music, Music, Music. Learn music. Practice guitar. Write songs. Work on sight singing. Learn to speak the language of music.
- Movement for creativity. Make movement a DAILY thing. Time for my body and mind to get in tune.
- (Bonus cause I’m extra like that) Perform, perform, PERFORM my one woman show to anyone and everyone. Find venues and just do it!
Plan out one week of artist nurturing (I will do it this week since it’s my BDAY week)
Monday: Coffee, breakfast, and poetry at coffeeshop before work & movement
Tuesday: Watch video of solo performance. Edit into 10 minutes.
Wednesday: Slow yoga flow with music & essential oils
Thursday: Submit solo performance to United Solo Fest in NYC. Pull moon cards. Slow down, focus inward, give gratitude.
Friday: BIRTHDAY! Breakfast at favorite bakery in Mystic. Relish in new age. Set intentions. Enjoy. Celebrate.
Inventory the ways you have changed since your recovery:
I will do a longer post about this to wrap up the course, but since this is one of the tasks this week I will do a quick bullet point list.
- “just do it” mentality – small actionable steps lead to completion of projects
- creativity makes me so happy. I have to always have a creative project going on in order to feel purposeful.
- learned so much about overcoming blocks & fear: most importantly learned that to be a great, successful artist doesn’t mean you don’t feel fear. It means you feel the fear and do it anyways.
- willingness to splurge on my artist because I am worth it (bought a guitar, bought expensive abundance course, bought creativity class)
- coming from a place of abundance not lack
- willing to be a beginner again and revel in the joy of learning
- creativity is really about spirituality. they’re one in the same.
Synchronicity of the Week
-as a result of performing my one-woman show was contacted by so many people who had strange connections to the piece. One girl had a very similar experience to something I had which affirmed to me that when you tell your truth, it will be universal because you are h u m a n. Another girl shared my viewpoints completely & wants to collaborate. Another girl told me she wanted to PERFORM my show which is crazy because I never imagined someone else would perform it. It opened up what could be possible with this work.
Mermaid Musings 